With the Memorial Day weekend just past, it’s official: summer is upon us. And the season of picnics and parades and baseball games is also one for settling back—on the beach, in the park, or in an air-conditioned room—with a good book.
We asked at the end of last year which books you’d want to give as holiday gifts—and you came through with a long and read-worthy list. Now that the summer is here, we want to hear from you again: What beach reading would you recommend, to journalists in particular? What works—new or classic, serious or fun—should be on our reading radar this summer?
Every Tuesday, CJR outlines a news-related question and opens the floor for debate. For previous News Meeting topics, click here.
Christine L. Borgman, Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet (The MIT Press, 2007).
Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, and Harry Lewis, Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion, 1st ed. (Addison-Wesley Professional, 2008).
Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It (Yale University Press, 2008).
#1 Posted by Timothy Murray, CJR on Thu 28 May 2009 at 12:38 PM
"The Best and the Brightest" - David Halberstam
"Angels and Ages" - Adam Gopnik
"Passionate Minds" - David Bodanis
"The Last Empire: Essays 1992 - 2000" - Gore Vidal
"The Orwell Reader: Fiction, Essays, And Reportage" - George Orwell, with an introduction by Richard H. Rovere
#2 Posted by Andrew Gachanja, CJR on Sat 30 May 2009 at 04:29 PM
"The Best and the Brightest" - David Halberstam
"Angels and Ages" - Adam Gopnik
"Passionate Minds" - David Bodanis
"The Last Empire: Essays 1992 - 2000" - Gore Vidal
"The Orwell Reader: Fiction, Essays, And Reportage" - George Orwell, with an introduction by Richard H. Rovere
#3 Posted by Andrew Gachanja, CJR on Sat 30 May 2009 at 04:31 PM
Doesn't matter that it was published in 1985. Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" should be required reading for anyone purporting to be a journalist. The man just saw the forest.
#4 Posted by Steve Daley, CJR on Sat 30 May 2009 at 05:23 PM
There Are No Children Here, Alex Kotlowitz's story of two young boys--Lafayette and Pharoah Rivers--growing up in a violence-plagued public housing project on Chicago's West Side. Alternately frustrating and uplifting, nauseating and infuriating, Kotlowitz's narrative--an expansion of a 1987 series he wrote for The Wall Street Journal--serves, among many other things, as an apt reminder of the power of empathy. On the part of the journalist and his audience.
#5 Posted by Megan Garber, CJR on Mon 1 Jun 2009 at 10:39 AM
Fiction with real insight: Stone's Fall, by Iain Pears. Journalists benefit from an occasional dose of history to notice that it's repeating itself.
#6 Posted by Sophie Jensen, CJR on Mon 1 Jun 2009 at 11:01 AM
Wallace, by Marshall Frady. The unjustly forgotten Frady published this slim biography of George Wallace during the Alabama governor's 1968 presidential run. I'd compare it to All The King's Men, except Robert Penn Warren doesn't write as well as Marshall Frady.
#7 Posted by Justin Peters, CJR on Mon 1 Jun 2009 at 11:23 AM
Thanks, Sophie. And that also makes me think of Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought--which explores the technological upheaval/innovation in Jacksonian America, and which offers a similar historical perspective.
#8 Posted by Megan Garber, CJR on Mon 1 Jun 2009 at 11:24 AM
Untended Gates: The Mismanaged Press by former Columbia J-School member Norman Isaacs. Yes. It's Stephen Isaacs dad.
#9 Posted by Gene Roman, CJR on Mon 1 Jun 2009 at 09:01 PM
I would recommend Timonthy Wilson's "Strangers to Ourselves," Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, "Nudge," Robert Burton "On Being Certain," anything by Rampton and Stauber, Tom McGarity and Wendy Wagner, Bending Science," Collins & Skover, "The Death of Discourse" and Robert Monks, "Corpocracy"
#10 Posted by Tamara Piety, CJR on Tue 2 Jun 2009 at 09:20 AM
BE THE MEDIA is a must read for every current and future journalist so there is a job to come back to and succeed after the summer vacation.
Link here: http://www.1shoppingcart.com/app/?af=978763
THE ELIMINATIONIST, unfortunately, is a must read for anyone covering politics or issues in American now.
#11 Posted by Curtis Walker, CJR on Tue 2 Jun 2009 at 09:21 AM
Everybody loves a good drought by P Sainath, winner of 2007 Ramon Magsasay Award for journalism, literature, and creative communication arts. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen called him "one of the world's great experts on famine and hunger"(wikipedia)
#12 Posted by vipul vivek, CJR on Wed 3 Jun 2009 at 04:42 AM
Heh, this is not beach reading, but critical nevertheless:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/Main_Page
#13 Posted by Josh Young, CJR on Wed 3 Jun 2009 at 11:38 AM
"Scoop," by Evelyn Waugh, one of the best books ever written about journalism.
#14 Posted by Richard Wald, CJR on Wed 3 Jun 2009 at 11:55 AM
an investigative reporting-centric list, light on discussions of cyberspace, heavy on old-fashioned shoe leather...
"Scandals, Scamps and Scoundrels," by James Phelan (a really fun read)
"The Muckrakers," by Fred J. Cook (especially the chapter about "Cigarette")
"To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells," by Linda O. McMurray
"Backroom Politics,"by Bill and Nancy Boyarsky (indispensible for any journalist who wants to cover the world of government and politics)
"All the President's Men," by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (an obvious choice, but still beach-worthy reading)
"The Investigative Journalist," by James Dygert
"Confessions of a Muckraker," by Jack Anderson, with James Boyd
"The Powers That Be," by David Halberstam (epic and inspiring)
"The Boys on the Bus," by Timothy Crouse
"Who will the People," by William Greider
"24 Days: How two Wall Street Journal reporters uncovered the lies that destroyed faith in Corporate America," by Rebecca Smith and John R. Emshwiller
"Muckraking!: Journalism that Changed America," by William Serrin and Judith Serrin
"Investigative Reporting," by Clark R. Mollenhoff
"The Corpse Had A Familiar Face," Edna Buchanan (another riveting read)
"Poison Penmanship," by Jessica Mitford (especially the introduction and chapter titled, "Let Us Now Appraise Famous Writers")
"I.F. Stone: A Portrait," by Andrew Patner
#15 Posted by mike hudson, CJR on Wed 3 Jun 2009 at 01:57 PM
"A Matter of Opinion" by one Victor S. Navasky. I read this recently and it certainly qualifies as beaching reading for it's Navasky's whimsical prose but it is much more than that. "The Age of American Unreason" by Susan Jacoby is also a great read, which discusses the degradation of American intellectual capital, important for journalists. And Howard Zinn's "Passionate Declarations."
#16 Posted by Darius, CJR on Wed 3 Jun 2009 at 10:34 PM
Interesting. People want you to read lots of history and policy, but not one thing smacking of science. You'd think we lived in the 13th century.
On the assumption that science is at least as important to our future as anything else, try Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics; Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science; Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution is True; and David Park, The How and the Why.
#17 Posted by Paul Camp, CJR on Thu 4 Jun 2009 at 01:51 PM
Three great ones in the fiction (or is it?) realm:
A Flash of Green
Dwarf Rapes Nun, Flees in UFO
I Shouldn't Be Telling You This
#18 Posted by Solange De Santis, CJR on Thu 4 Jun 2009 at 10:42 PM
My previous post lost all its formatting. The titles are: "A Flash of Green," "Dwarf Rapes Nun, Flees in UFO" and "I Shouldn't Be Telling You This."
#19 Posted by Solange De Santis, CJR on Thu 4 Jun 2009 at 10:44 PM
The Political Economy of Media by Robert McChesney
The Future of the Internet by Jonathan Zittrain
Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig
A Century of Spin: How Public Relations Became the Cutting Edge of Corporate Power by William Dinan and David Millar
Good Luck!
#20 Posted by michael benton, CJR on Fri 5 Jun 2009 at 09:51 AM
Recommended reading is a familiar classic, perhaps not familiar enough given its essential themes: the social uses of knowledge, individual heroism (more or, decidedly, less)in the face of repression,
the conflict of modernity and tradition. The dramatist Bertold Brecht's Life of Galileo is as conhtemporary today as when it was written in the thirties, when Brecht had fled his native Germany to escape the Nazis.
#21 Posted by norman birnbaum, CJR on Fri 5 Jun 2009 at 10:45 AM
Dreiser's THE FINANCIER, which explains exactly, step by step, how well-connected people arrange gigantic swindles and bond-related malfeasances.
#22 Posted by Todd Gitlin, CJR on Sat 6 Jun 2009 at 09:36 AM
Theodore Dreiser's The Titan should also be read. (David Mamet recently reported that he was influenced by Dreiser along with Willa Cather & Frank Norris, all of whom were from the Midwest.)
#23 Posted by Paul Sweeney, CJR on Sun 7 Jun 2009 at 12:54 AM
36 Views of Mount Fuji by Cathy Davidson for a little bit of eloquent, introspective non-fiction
#24 Posted by Genevieve Walker, CJR on Sun 7 Jun 2009 at 01:46 PM
American Radical:The Life and Times of I.F.Stone by D.D. Guttenplan
This may sound like it's a little heavy for the beach, but Guttenplan's prose casts its own sunshine on America's number one investigative reader.
The Scarecrow by Miichael Connelly
Who knew that newspaper buyouts would provide the perfect backdrop for this summer's number two or three murder mystery? (Michael Connelly, the former sports editor of The Denver Post, that's who.)
#25 Posted by victor navasky, CJR on Mon 8 Jun 2009 at 10:14 AM
"Thomas Morton of Merrymount; The Life and Renaissance of an Early American Poet" by Jack Dempsey. Suppression of dissent in America, and the couching of that suppression in moral terms to hide the economic reasons, goes back to the very beginning of our history, in this case to the mid 1620s.
#26 Posted by John M. Emery, CJR on Tue 9 Jun 2009 at 03:32 PM
Field of Blood, The Dead Hour, and Slip of the Knife—a trilogy by Denise Mina that takes Paddy Meehan of Glasgow, a wonderful character, through a journalistic career. She's a copy girl in the first, a reporter in the second, and an established columnist by the third. Set it Glasgow, with a great sense of place, class, and life in the kind of sharp-elbows newsroom that some of us will remember. Her challenges range from a tendency to eat too much to a rogue IRA killer. Good writing, and fun.
#27 Posted by mike hoyt, CJR on Thu 11 Jun 2009 at 01:48 PM
Xenophon - Anabasis
Herodotus - The Histories
Hunter S Thompson - The Rum Diary
#28 Posted by Hardrada, CJR on Thu 11 Jun 2009 at 02:52 PM
Victor Navasky: When was Michael Connelly, the novelist, ever sports editor of the Denver Post? He worked at the Rocky News, by several accounts, but I've searched Google and my own shaky memory and I find no hint that the Post ever employed him. Maybe you've confused him with another Mike Connelly.
#29 Posted by Mr. Wuxtry, CJR on Fri 12 Jun 2009 at 11:45 AM
Collected writings of Lafcadio Hearn in the new library of America edition. Invaluable look back at an unfairly neglected practitioner of the craft of non-fiction
#30 Posted by Bill Marvel, CJR on Fri 12 Jun 2009 at 11:57 AM
Vladimir Mayakovsky's essays, and The Bedbug and Selected Poetry. Nothing like a Futurist to refresh the journalistic mind.
#31 Posted by Jane Kim, CJR on Fri 12 Jun 2009 at 05:03 PM
Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture by David Hajdu
#32 Posted by Jay Irani, CJR on Thu 1 Jul 2010 at 05:00 PM